Cantor loses

RICHMOND, Va. — It wasn’t enough that Eric Cantor spent $1 million in the weeks leading up to the election, when his primary opponent hardly had $100,000 in his campaign coffers.

It didn’t matter that the House majority leader, 51, branded Dave Brat a liberal hack, and himself as the guardian of the Republican creed. On Tuesday night, Cantor, who was swept into the majority leader’s suite in a tea party wave, was swept out by the same movement.

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Cantor conceded the race around 8:25 p.m. — shortly after the Associated Press pronounced Cantor’s 13-year political career at least temporarily over. With nearly 98 percent of precincts reporting, Brat had 55 percent of the vote, while Cantor had 44 percent. People close to Cantor said internal polls showed him hovering near 60 percent in the runup to the race.

It’s one of the most stunning losses in modern House politics, and completely upends the GOP hierarchy in both Virginia and Washington. Cantor enjoyed a meteoric rise that took him from chief deputy whip, to minority whip to majority leader in the span of 13 years.

Cantor was seen by many as the next speaker of the House, biding his time until Ohio Rep. John Boehner wanted to retire.

But now, Cantor has just six months left in Congress. He is the second incumbent to lose this primary season: 91-year-old Texas Rep. Ralph Hall was the first.

The loss will ripple across Washington, too: from political consultants who worked for Cantor to his aides who decamped for K Street, there will be reverberations.

At the Westin, where supporters from Virginia and Washington gathered to celebrate what they expected to be a victory, the crowd was stunned. At one point, a large projector screen that was showing the results turned off.

Cantor entered through a front entrance and was promptly whisked upstairs.

When it was clear he lost, Cantor appeared on stage with his wife and political director, Ray Allen. Wearing a red tie, and speaking with a raspy voice, Cantor opened his five-minute speech by saying: “Obviously, we came up short.”

He thanked his family for supporting him during a two-decade career, and said serving as a congressman and majority leader was “one of the highest honors of my life.”

“What I set out to do, and what the agenda that I have always said we’re about is we want to create a Virginia and America that works for everybody,” Cantor said. ” And we need to focus our efforts as conservatives, as Republicans, on putting forth our conservative solutions so that they can help solve the problems for so many working middle class families that may not have the opportunity that we have.”

Minutes after Cantor left, immigration protestors stormed the ballroom to push for reform. Cantor was gone — he had been whisked into a black SUV with his wife. Photographers and reporters were kept out of the way.

In the run-up to the primary, Cantor’s supporters said they expected him to win with more than 60 percent of the vote. For the past few months, his D.C. allies were wondering how big they could goose the margins.

But there were warning signs that kept piling up — signs that his supporters brushed off consistently. In April, Brat supporters vastly outnumbered Cantor allies at local GOP meetings. Then in May, tea party fueled activists knocked off Cantor’s choice for local GOP chair in Cantor’s home base of Henrico County. But Cantor’s aides consistently brushed off the challenge, telling reporters and fellow GOP aides that the contest didn’t merit the media coverage it was getting.